July 30, 2011

Cowboys believe in 'aggressively' installing plays, Garrett says

The Cowboys are putting in as many plays as fast as they can, coach Jason Garrett said.

“We’re very aggressive with our installs,” he said. “We believe that you have to be aggressive, get a lot of information in there and then hopefully you teach it well and hopefully you have a system that the players see some consistency within and then you can keep growing from there.”

How much the players retain will be evaluated later, Garrett said. For now, it’s about putting plays in.

“We put in 42 plays yesterday. We put in 30 today,” linebacker DeMarcus Ware said with a laugh.

Garrett is counting on the players to pick it up.

“We talk to our players a lot about knowing the alphabet. You’ve got to know the alphabet of the system. You’ve got to know what the numbers mean, the words mean,” he said. “We’re going to have a lot of pages, a lot of schemes on the page every morning. They need to understand what those things mean. What the letters mean. And then you can start putting that stuff together and you can have a lot of volume. At the end of the day, you have to evaluate how the players are playing within the scheme. Can they run this play? Can we use this blitz? ... And then the whole thing kind of whittles down and you get to your offense and defense and kicking-game system. So we believe in being aggressive in our installs and seeing how guys can handle it. Hopefully we’re systematic and we’re good teachers, and then what sticks and what we’re good at, is what we’ll keep in our system.”